Mani Shankar Aiyar also uses a conversation as the prologue to his book. But unlike Chamman Mian’s, this is not an imaginary conversation. He reproduces it from a 1995 issue of the now-defunct Sunday magazine. The conversation is with Arun Shourie, on Islam. It highlights how Islam is understood and misunderstood in Indian public discourse, sympathetically regarded and wilfully distorted, sometimes over the heads of decent Muslims, and couched in arcane theology.